Pushing the boundaries with tech
During his slot in the martech stream, Ben Rees, CMO at Redgate shared what he learned when building his martech stack.
His key piece of advice was to focus on cost. “The martech landscape is a bit of a jungle. At its core, your strategy must be either to increase revenue, or save costs. If it can’t be coined in these terms, you need to look at it again,” he says.
Evaluating your return
Return = Number of customers affected x uplift per customer – full costs
Ben’s advice on building a martech stack
• Go manual first, then automate.
• You’re either growing revenue, or saving costs. Should be able to show this benefit on a piece of A5.
• The business case has to be overwhelming.
• However long or expensive you think it will be to implement – double it.
• Make step changes, not incremental improvements.
How do you prove and improve the value of your B2B marketing?
In his session on the martech stream, David van Schaick CMO and CDO at The Marketing Practice and Jon Moger, Senior Director Marketing, EMEA, Aruba shared how to reveal hidden insights in your existing data, how to understand what is and isn’t working, plus how to set up your marketing automation planning process.
Here are some highlights:
1. Encourage a data-driven culture
Make being ‘data-driven’ part of the daily rhythm and culture of your marketing team. Try incubator teams: You need a group or a person who ‘gets it’ and has the ability to run experiments, develop and share best practice.
The power of ‘swagger stories’ – little anecdotes of success that are simple to remember and easy to repeat – in getting people to believe an approach is working.
2. Use data for big and small improvements
You can use data to make incremental improvements at the big-picture level (strategy) and at the level of micro-optimisations. Ideally you want to balance both. Marketing needs to combine optimisation (by giving an extra 1%) and innovation (random leaps forward). If you need to teach an algorithm to find the highest point, you find several points and move upwards.
3. Keep an open mind
We’re conditioned to aim for perfection – anything less seems unprofessional. But how impactful is it to take the same route as everyone else? Marketing emails that contain deliberate grammatical mistakes prove very effective at one-to-one demand generation.
4. Start small
It’s not about having a big technology stack or teams of analysts, it's about building a vision and finding different areas to improve, piece by piece. Start small, take baby steps and after a while you’ll look back and realise how far you’ve come.